Politics & Power Quote by Jerzy Kosinski

Kosinski’s line reads like a calm policy memo until you notice the poison needle: he treats homelessness not as a glitch in America, but as a feature. Calling it “part of our American system” strips the country of its favorite alibi - that visible poverty is an aberration, a temporary failure of charity, or the result of individual moral lapse. It’s structural, baked in, tolerated because it performs a function: disciplining labor, signaling consequences, reminding everyone else to stay “productive.”

The second sentence is the real provocation. “There should be nothing wrong” isn’t approval; it’s an indictment dressed as stoicism. Kosinski sets a trap by adopting the language of pragmatism, then smuggling in a moral standard: the problem isn’t merely being without a home, it’s the deliberate addition of “unnecessary suffering and punishment.” That phrase points to how the U.S. often handles homelessness: not with housing, but with policing, sweeps, hostile architecture, anti-loitering ordinances, shelters that feel carceral, and bureaucratic hoops that convert desperation into compliance tests.

As a novelist who made his name excavating dehumanization and social performance, Kosinski is attuned to systems that require a visible underclass while insisting they deserve their fate. His subtext is bleakly American: we can accept homelessness as normal so long as we can pretend the cruelty surrounding it is accidental. He refuses that comfort. The system may be “American,” but the punishment is a choice - and that’s where responsibility begins.